To Unlock Your Small Business Potential with Social Media – Ensure You are Setting Clear Goals & Objectives about what you want your social marketing to achieve.
When using social media or traditional advertising, be sure to Set Clear Objectives. Determine what you want to achieve with your efforts—be it brand awareness, customer engagement, or driving
sales. Setting objectives and goals for your small business marketing will help you determine what efforts are working and what changes should be made. Goals can be brand-specific or customer-related. Your objectives should include a mix of both goals. Starting with a set of clear objectives will guide your actions and help ensure you can measure your success. Your objectives could include:
Growth – you want to grow your sales and increase your revenue. Perhaps you want to grow your email list to reach potential new customers. The success of this goal and objective is easily measured and is typically the easiest to analyze for results.
Brand Voice, Awareness, & Reputation – you want people to know who your company is and have them talking about you. Positive brand awareness is the amount of trust your customers have in your company; and a rating of your Company Reputation. Hubspot has an article “Ultimate Guide to Brand Awareness” and includes a free download of a brand-building guide.
Community Building – you want to be considered part of your local community. This could be networking and collaborating with other small businesses, volunteering to foster company goodwill, or establishing an annual event in your town’s community center. Meltingspot has an article “Community Building: Definition & Principles” that digs deeper into community building and gives insight into why this could be a valuable goal and objective for your company.
Promotions – you want people to know when you are having sales, events, special guests, new product releases, existing product upgrades, and more. This goal and objective gets people on to your e-commerce site and/or into your store.
Once you have decided what your social media should achieve, set your goals and objectives, plan your campaigns, publish your content, and analyze your results. Not meeting the clearly defined goals and objectives will let you know something about the content (timing, audience, platform, information) needs to be adjusted. Make necessary adjustments, rinse, and repeat.
